


Sprung Traps, Deals with Demons, and Other Ill-Advised Choices

by BenevolentErrancy



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: (like pre-pre-relationship), Alternate Universe - Magic, Bartimaeus AU, F/M, Gen, Pre-Relationship, Symmrat Week 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-11
Updated: 2017-01-11
Packaged: 2018-09-16 18:51:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9285407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BenevolentErrancy/pseuds/BenevolentErrancy
Summary: If a mage wants power, they will, inevitably, need to deal with demons.This is only for the well-trained and studious individuals though, those who are prepared to follow all the steps and rules of summoning like their life depends on it.  Because it does.A djinn like Junkrat holds no love for mages or the command they're able to hold over him in order to control his magic, but he's also not the sort to roll over and accept that sort of leash.  So when he feels the tugs of a summoning he doesn't resist, but rushes to meet it.  Whether or not the mage knows it yet, his trap has just been sprung and they are about to see first hand the dangers of dealing with demons.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is... uh, loosely an au based on the first book of the Bartimaeus Sequence, and I say loosely because it's been literal years since I've read any of those books so god only knows how close I have or have not stuck to details.

You never quite forgot the tug.  No matter how much time passed between a summoning, it settled over you again like an ache that had never actually left.  It was like rats under your skin, gnawing at your bones; it was like hooks dug into your marrow and pulling, pulling, pulling until you gave in and followed them.

So Junkrat followed them, and he followed them with glee.  Normally getting yanked around by a bunch of pompous humans to deal with their petty problems wouldn’t be Junkrat’s ideal sort of day, but he’d always been one to scrounge an opportunity.  Some djinn would drive themselves mad trying to hide themselves away and what good did it do them?  Damn little, humans were like a disease, you couldn’t get rid of them.  So rather than try to hide himself away, he may has well have drawn the humans a map and lit his hidey-hole up with lights, as it were.  But rather than find him, all they got was a trap sprung and loaded and waiting for the arrogant to come trapaising through without a second thought.  A laugh bumbled up in Junkrat’s throat just thinking about it – it had been a long while this time since his trap had been triggered, and he was more than happy to meet the fool on the other side.  Robes were always just _so eager_ to put themselves dangerously close to a fanged mouth when they thought they had it leashed, the cocky fucks.

When Junkrat crossed over, it was with a deafening explosion and a volcanic blast.  If this Robe’s summoning circle had any sort of holes in it, they’d be dead before Junkrat even managed to fully manifest.  Instead the flames of his body slammed against the invisible walls of the summoning circle hard enough that it rang out like an ancient gongs and rose up the sides, growing into a twisting, howling inferno.  Which was an appropriately dramatic introduction, Junkrat felt.  Manifesting more fully, he twisted the flames into a face, one with a gaping, soot-black mouth and white-bright explosions for eyes, and he _shrieked_.

Some djinn preferred to set an atmosphere first, chill a room or send sinister whispers curling from the other side, but Junkrat had better things to do than waste his time with party favours.  If a Robe had the nerve to summon him, they better be _ready_ for him because he was coming all at once.

Only once the ceiling was covered with blackened scourge marks and the room crackled with unbearable heat did he let the flames die as quickly as they’d come, scattering ash over the ground as he twisted his body again, reshaping it from flames into seething rats, black and grey and scar-covered and ugly.  Disease and pestilence and hunger and anger, let this Robe him for what he was, let them see what they had the audacity to summon.  With hundreds of tiny feet, he stormed over the floor, hundreds of bodies with a single mind racing over top of each other, clambering at the invisible sides of the circle, shrieking their sharp, yellow teeth, and testing every inch of it with probing, sensitive whiskers.  If there was any slip, any smudge, any smear to the summoning circle, he would find it.  And then he wouldn’t even have to wait for his trap to click shut around the mage, he could just destroy them with their own incompetence.

“Enough.”

Junkrat stilled.  He was never fully still, not truly, especially not in this form with his many bodies twisting and twitching and piling on top of each other, moving like fleshy sacks of bone and blood, but he drew himself together enough to give focus to the person who had the nerve to speak so calmly and demandingly in his presence.

Fucking Robes.

Now that he gave the room he had been summoned into some better attention, he was rather surprised by the spartan quality of it.  Normally Robes were vain bastards, and they loved their workrooms to reflect that.  There should be bookshelves filled with texts they liked to pretend were older and more important than they were, work tables full of projects, expensive trinkets and baubles hanging off shelves and draping from the ceiling.  Magic was only a small portion of what it meant to be a Robe, as far as Junkrat could tell – most of it was making sure everyone else knew you were one, and knew you were a better one than they were.  This room though was very different.  The floor and walls were painted a stark white, and while it meant the space in the circle was now rather satisfyingly covered with his filth, it succeeded in unnerving him as well.  The room was bright and well-lit – of course, for a summoning, you didn’t _need_ a gloomy room lit by a million, dribbly black candles, but most Robes seemed to think you did.  Or at least seemed to think the _aesthetic_ was important.  This one clearly wasn’t fooled by that.  Junkrat could count exactly six candles place around the circle, the exact number needed for this sort of summoning, and it was a plain, undyed tallow, obviously freshly lit and not at all ominous or dribbly looking.  Shame, Junkrat had once been summoned by a Robe whose candles were so old and well dribbled, that one had guttered before the contract had been sealed.  That of course, had been all Junkrat had needed to break free of the circle – ha, that Robes face when he realized.  Remembering it kept Junkrat warm on those lonely nights.

Not only was this Robe missing all that ridiculous extra stuff though, but even the room itself was strange.  The walls and floor, besides for being perfectly white, were also perfectly smooth rather some Robes’ workroom which were made out of stone- or wood-work.  That meant there was nothing to accidentally cause a bump or gap in a summoning line.  And these summoning lines were done with an almost military precision, and were all drawn in very clear, black chalk so there was no room for fanciful misinterpretation of the lines – _frustrating_.

In a smaller circle, attached to his own by single tethering line, was a blue gemstone, obviously used to help power the spell.  Normally a Robe would want at least half a dozen of those things, just to show they _had_ them to use. Of course as Junkrat pressed at the circle, it was clear that this single stone was all it really.  With some disappointment he could see that it wasn’t even worth anything, it was a very basic, magic-charged grounding stone.

There wasn’t a single thing about this room or the equipment used to summon him that wasn’t clean, utilitarian, and brutally efficient.  Not only was it disappointing and more than a bit boring, it was also unnerving.  Robes were supposed to _like_ things unnecessarily complicated, and he liked that they liked it – it made it so much easier to exploit.  Just to be sure, Junkrat flicked his vision through the first several planes of vision, in case there was something magical being hidden.  If there were something else in this room, besides the Robe facing him and her bare bones summoning equipment though, it had a glamour woven over it tightly enough that it was hidden on six separate planes of vision. Junkrat wasn’t actually sure what was more likely – that someone had gone to the trouble of hiding something that well in a room like this, or that he’d run into a Robe that didn’t feel the need to show off at every opportunity.

The Robe herself though did look like she fit in this strange workroom though, that Junkrat could admit.  She was obviously a formally trained mage, and she stood prim and straight, with long hair drawn back into a severe bun, and a simple, flowing blue robe – it must be a modern fashion whatever it was, Junkrat figured with some irritability.  Magic was magic, and he was a djinn that could burn her straight through to her bone marrow if he was unleashed, yet Robes still insisted that there should be a _fashion_ to it.  Sometimes he came over and everyone was carrying a damn staff, as if they needed one and it wasn’t their summoned imps and demons doing all the work, next there was that weird time when everyone was wearing oversized, bulging pouches on their belts, like they’d decided to leave the house with half their workshop on them. This mage’s robe was slit around the base, showing off her legs, was trimmed with gold, and was sleeveless.  Well, he supposed it was a step up from the stuffy black that kept persistently coming back into fashion.

More interesting than the Robe’s robe though, was her _arm_. Even on the first plane you could tell it was magical, and on every plane up from there it seemed to glow.  It was sleek and white – almost like the room itself – and had very powerful feeling stones set into its shoulder and the back of its hand.  Of course, she also had amulets worked into the necklace she wore and a pair of shimmering blue earrings, but those were simple things – protection, clarity, power – and even the blue visor she wore, obviously a magicked glass to see planes beyond the first – wasn’t that interesting.  Not compared to the arm.  Hmm.  Maybe he’d take that back with him when he’d finished dealing with her, might make a nice treasure to add to his stash.  

“Demon, you will listen to me and you will obey,” the woman said.  It was clear she would allow no resistance.  Junkrat toyed with the idea of being obstinate just for the sheer pleasure of riling her up, but decided against it.  There was never anything fun about being stuck in a summoning circle; the sooner she let him out, the sooner he could incinerate her and move on with his life.

“ _Sure_ ,” he drawled, and with a final heave the mound of rats surged together and formed a solid figure in the shape of a human man.

Of course the fire, the rats, even the shape he had now of a man, those were all images project on the first few planes (the first four, as it happened – she wouldn’t be able to see any of the planes past that even with that fancy eyewear so why bother).  Those shapes simply cloaked his true form and allowed him to interact with objects on the first plane of existence.  The shape he chose to show now was a scraggly one, barely better than the rats he’d been before.  Long limbed – too tall for a normal human, even hunched over – and unnervingly bony.  His nose was sharp and long, as were his teeth, and his hair rose from his head in patches, constantly smouldering with fire while soot settled over his face and shoulders.  He leaned leisurely against the empty air and leered at the Robe.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked.

“I have a job that needs to be done, and you will be the one to do it,” she replied.

“Eugh, you wound me, shiela.  Straight to business, not even a g'day – that cuts me deep, that does.  'Least you could do it say hi, if you’re gonna be, ha, hiring on my expertise.”

“You may call me Symmetra, that is all you should need to know besides for the mission parameters themselves.”

“Symmetra, eh?  I’d say it’s a pretty name, but I know well enough that it’s not your name at all, is it?”

“Just as you should also know that you will not trick me into revealing my true name.  …Especially not with such a clumsy, transparent attempt.”

Junkrat shrugged.  It was always worth a shot.  This “Symmetra” was clearly well-trained, almost certainly formally apprenticed, and that would mean she’d had the importance of names drilled into her head plenty over the years.  It wasn’t often Junkrat was able to get a real name out of the Robe that summoned him, but it did happen, and it was always worth at least a shot.  The things you could do to a person when you had their name…

“Only seemed fair, given that you clearly know mine,” Junkrat pointed out.

“And that is how it will stay.”

“Fair enough, fair enough.  I am curious though – what’s with the arm?” The Robe stayed tight lipped, simply blinked coolly at him.  “Aw come on, tell me this at least: did it get bitten off by some beastie you didn’t have a good enough hold of, or did you cut it off yourself to scrape up that _little bit more power?_ ” She said nothing.  Junkrat hugged, “Pah, I can tell already we’re gonna be the best of friends, mate.  This’ll be a right treat for me, no doubt.”

“I don’t particularly care,” said Symmetra.  “You will perform your function, and that is sufficient.”  

With that cheery proclamation, Symmetra knelt to a smaller, pre-drawn circle within the protective circle that held her.  That would be the contract summons then.  Junkrat squinted at it – there were all types of contract you could draw up.  Sometimes people underestimated his strength and chose to weak of a contract to hold him.  And then the stronger the contract got, the more complex to draw – sometimes mages made mistakes.  Not that she seemed like the sort of person not to triple check her contract summons, so Junkrat wasn’t surprised with a cursory glance revealed no errors.  With a well-practiced sweep of her chalk, Symmetra completed the summons and Junkrat felt his hair stand on edge as the tell-tale charge of a contract appeared with in his own summoning circle.  There would be no choice but to sign it now.  A Robe could do terrifying things to an unbound demon in a well-made summoning circle.  Of course, you always got some drongos that resisted but Junkrat had never seen the point – they just hold you longer than you’d be held otherwise and then they had an excuse to rough you up in the process, and Robes rarely needed too much prompting to exercise their power over something.  So with a sweep of his hand – his real hand, unseen by the Robe beneath his glamours – he made his mark on the contract, a process that simply meant his essence was tied to whatever the Robe had written and the ancient magic of it.  As he did so, Junkrat couldn’t help but grin to himself, biting his lips to hold back the laughter that he could feel building in his gut.

 _Snap_ goes the trap.

He gave the Robe a flourishing bow.  “All done, your humble servant is ready to serve.”

Symmetra checked over her own, chalk-drawn contract circle rather than taking his word on it, nodding with approval when she saw the marks twist and change to show that he had been tied to it.  And then came for that sweet moment of release, when she stepped forward out of her own circle, thereby severing the spell that kept his own circle together. After all, she didn’t have to be afraid anymore.  When you were bound to a contract, you couldn’t hurt them any more, after all.

But, of course, the Robe needed to know your name, to bind you in contract.  Your _true_ name.

As soon as the summon circle’s power flickered out, Junkrat surged.  He was fire and explosions and destruction, and he shot from the summoning circle.  His ash streaked the walls and his hunger made the air so dry it crackled and his laughed filled the room like splinter glass.  Before he could touch her though, before he could shred those pathetic protection charms she wore, he felt his muscles lock and then the pain hit.  He went down and he went down hard, the fire immediately dying and theatrics fizzling out.  All that was left was his simple, human-like form writhing on the floor as the Robe’s spell bit its fangs into him.

“Did you not hear me, perhaps?” Symmetra said, and damn her Junkrat swore he could hear amusement there at the edges of her voice.  Like she had _expected_ this. “You are bound to my will.  You will not attack me.”

“How _the fuck_ –”

“You don’t truly believe I would have made the amateurish mistake of summoning you here under that false name you’ve circulated, do you?”

Junkrat growled and the flames in his hair licked higher in annoyance.  Yes, yes he had, and now he was perfectly embarrassed about it, thank you. But in his defence, it had been working perfectly fine for decades now.

A djinn (or imp or demon or whatever other nasty you were groping about for) couldn’t be summoned unless you knew its name.  A summons wasn’t a contract though, it wasn’t binding in the same way, and it did not require a true name – something mages had a way of overlooking. They had a delightful tendency to be very cocksure and self-satisfied when they thought they’d found a demon’s name for summoning, so it hadn’t been that hard of a thing, to attach a false name to himself. “Junkrat” was a pseudonym he’d been going by for almost longer than he could remember.  Mages dug it up, decided they wanted his power, summoned him over, and then Junkrat got to enjoy the delight of their panic and fear when they realized they had no hold true over him once they’d made him sign a contract written with a false name. Once they were gone there was no one to tell the world about this silly little mistake, and the name Junkrat would resurface again some time later with another hopeful looking to take advantage.

“I am not some child witch looking to play with spirits,” Symmetra said as she stood over him – no longer did Junkrat feel tall in this body, and he considered for a moment being petty enough to change back into the rats and scamper over her boots.  Then again, she didn’t look like the sort of person who’d be scared by that.  At best he’d probably get exasperation.  “I conduct my research professionally and thoroughly, and I know your name, Jamison.  It is by that name your contract was written, it is by that name you are bound, and it is by that name I will command you.”

Jamison spat in annoyance, before finally pushing himself upright.  His body shifted as he did so, a long, whip-like tail forming and his teeth and nails sharpening further.  Annoyance thrummed through his body – he did _not_ like being tricked and he did _not_ like being beaten.   _He_ was the hunter, _he_ lay the traps, _not_ the other way around.  It had been some time since a human had managed to hold his leash.

“I’m not sure you made a good choice there, shiela; I don’t take orders well,” he warned her.  And he didn’t.  Anything less than an iron-clad command, he _would_ take advantage of, he _would_ break their contract, and he _would_ destroy her.

“I do not make bad choices, demon,” she informed him, “I make educated ones.  I require something very specific and difficult performed, which means I need an expert.  All my readings suggest that that is you.  In any case, I think you may actually be intrigued by what I intend to do.”

“Oh yeah,” Jamison sneered.  “And what’s that?  Mess up your rival’s hair?  Flub some opponent’s spell?  Put on a little fire and lights show to show off a bit?”

“Something very rare and very powerful has recently resurfaced from obscurity. The one to unlock and wield its power would, quite literally, have the power to shape the world – for the good or ill.  My company has taken an interest in it, and therefore so have I.  I require it stolen from those that currently possess it.”  She gave him a considering look.  “My sources suggest that you are considered something of a thief among demons.  A treasure hunter.  Get this for me, and do so well, without fighting me every step of the way, and I think we can work out an arrangement that will please us both.”

Jamison felt his heart pick up a little, tail twitching with interest, though he would never admit it.  “Junkrat” was known for his affinity with fire and explosions.  When Robes summoned him under that name, they were looking for big, raw power, plain and simple.  It had been a long time since he’d been sent to steal anything of even remote interest.

He did not want to be intrigued a human.  No good ever came from it and he knew he got involved in their petty squabbles too easily – Roadhog would never let him live down the time they’d been summoned together and Junkrat’s idiotic, blindly won trust in their summoner led to both of them nearly being killed along with the Robe.  No, better to avoid it all.

…Yet he couldn’t help but be a little intrigued by this woman who had so easily put him to heel, who was so efficient and skilled and yet was apparently willing to toe one of the most cardinal rules of magic: do not enter deals with a demon.

“Alright,” said Jamison.  “I’m listening.”

**Author's Note:**

> be gentle, I wrote this in a day for fun so I can't attest to whether it makes sense to anyone else besides me, I just wanted to ignore my homework and do something for symmrat week ;-;
> 
> It's more like a (long) ficlet than anything, just an introduction to a hypothetical longer work


End file.
